"...I consume a lot of information across an incredibly wide spectrum of disciplines and sources, always aiming to synthesize the meaningful and connect it with something else for a larger portrait of what matters in the world."

Robin Good's insight:

Maria Popova is the editor of Brain PIckings, a unique blog site cum newsletter that curates stories and articles from the web that stimulate the mind of the curious and which provide insight into the type of culture we live in.

In an excellent 2010 interview written by Chris Allison, Maria explains what she defines as curation and how she goes about it in her every day work.

In her definition: "Brain Pickings is a highly curatorial endeavor. And the art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large.

Every piece of content on Brain Pickings is hand-picked for embodying the sort of cultural interestingness at the core of our curatorial vision – it’s creative, compelling and makes a meaningful contribution to the world; it offers a justification to be curious and enriches you in the process of indulging that curiosity."

Maria also provides great examples of curation at work, and explains how all of the advertising on her site is "pro bono" and fitting her objective of curating in full the reader experience. In other words, Maria curates which ads are showcased on her site by selecting those reflecting companies and products she actually believes in for free.

She also provides a valuable, and much valid to this day, vision for the future of curation and curators. Niche specialization, is in this case, the name of the game.

Robin Good: Krishna Bharat, creator of Google News and now Principle Scientist at Google, spoke at the News World Summit in Bangalore, India.

His focus was on the future of news and on the impotance of curation as well as on what the news will look and "feel" like.

He rightly suggests to news teams to "provide guides to content", not just new content and to deliver information in ways that entice the reader in multiple ways, while providing lots of good and well referenced information.

Excerpted from the original Poynter.org article: "As consumers have access to vast troves of news information from all over the world, Bharat urged news editorial teams to provide a guide to content, not just produce content.

“Creation and curation should be the fundamental activities for your editorial team,” he said.

Bharat said news in the future will become more of an app-like experience, as users adapt the experience to themselves, and as newsrooms provide a more multi-dimensional experience that includes more images and maps.

“The collage tells the story.

This will create a skill set that doesn’t exist yet.”

And also:

"The winning experience of the future is fast, tactile, original content, with access to many reputable sources in an appealing narrative form,” Bharat said.

“It is delivered in an appealing, narrative form, encompasses a broader definition of news, and involves audiences with a stake in the story or with expertise."

Robin Good: Critical thinking is a key strategic skill needed by any serious professional curator.

"Critical thinking provides the keys for our own intellectual independence..." and it helps to move away from "rashy conclusions, mystification and reluctance to question received wisdom, authority and tradition" while learning how to adopt "intellectual discipline" and a way to express clearly ideas while taking personal responsibility for them.

Key takeaways from this video:

Critical thinking refers to a diverse range of intellectual skills and activities concerned with "evaluating information" as well as our own thought in a disciplined way.

Critical thinking is not just thinking a lot. To be an effective critical thinker you need to seek out and be guided by "knowledge" and "evidence" that fits with reality even if it refutes what the general consensus may want to believe.

Critical thinkers cultivate an attitude of curiosity and they are willing to do the work required to keep themselves informed about a subject.

Critical thinkers do not take claims at face value but utilize scepticism and doubt to suspend judgement and objectively evaluate with facts the claims being made.

Critical thinkers should evaluate information on the basis of reasoning and not by relying on emotions as claims the factuality of a claim cannot be solely based on the level of emotion that accompanies them or the fact that they may be believed by certain groups.

Thank you for sharing this video and the importance of critical thinking. It is so easy to get into the mindless consumption trap and making ourselves slow down, read, think, question, and seek is so important. It is all about the resisting the urge to click, but to hit the pause button and make yourself think

Grazie come sempre, Robin! You always share valuable information and this video is a great source to reflect on the importance of critical thinking to refine thought processes when curating content. Content curation certainly requires and develops "better thinking".

This a great blog post from Rian van der Merwe , describing the noise you can find on the web now, and especially content just created for SEO purposes or advertisers. As many, Rian is tired of it.

Rian speaks for many of us who are overwhelmed, overloaded with content that gives us no value at all. This is the problem

"I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing"'

Here's what caught my attention:

****The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning – just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

The Scoopit team agrees!

My input:

****The Opportunity: This is the time for all good curators to come forward - 2012 will be the year of the content curator -

**Know your audience

**Know their pain points

**Find and select the best content, add your own opinions, information or anything that will provide more value for your audience

**Select only the best content, don't just aggregate links that add to the noise

**Become a trusted resource - many opportunities will come to you, it's your time to shine

Tony reminds us that content curators play a role in information overload - they take time to sort, select, comment on good content that helps keeps you current on your topic of interest.

Tony says:

"With the ever increasing amount of online information from social networks, the need for organizing it has never been greater. Look around and there’s no shortage of aggregation tools to help us filter out the important stuff."

Here's what caught my attention:

**In this world of information overload, there’s now a new layer in the media ecosystem: the curator. If it wasn’t for that person who retweeted the story in the first place, you probably wouldn’t have seen it.

**So naming the retweeters in daily promos is the right course of action. Twitter is like a fire hose and Paper.li is selecting random tweets that would have otherwise been missed.

**Yes, they’re randomly chosen but I find a lot of value in them because they praise others for their contributions.

**It reminds me that they’re part of my network and I can appreciate their contributions that much more. I know when I’m named in someone’s newspaper it motivates me to continue sharing that type of content.

Kirsten Wilson analyzes three different levels of content curation presently in use and describes accurately the differences between these.

"In regards to levels of curation it is much like Blooms. There is knowledge level curation- it is done for remembering and understanding (the “Learner Level”).

Another level is applying and analyzing- it is curated for use or been used and is a proven tool for using whether it be your tool or a tool you have discovered from your global connections via Social Media, blogs or simple internet searches (the “Facilitator Level”).

Finally, there are curations that go to the level of evaluation and creation… these are the curations that become invaluable tools to others. It takes the most work, but the result is most thorough and the resource it provides to others can be invaluable (the “Designer Level”)."

He concludes by reminding all would-be curators the importance of attribution and the amount of effort that the "designer level" of curation requires: "In this world of immediate access and available content make every effort to honor the source of your curation, inspiration and/or springboard for design.

Those that do curate at a “Designer” level and in many cases are the first in their field of expertise to find a new “method” put hours into the development and design."

Kirsten Wilson analyzes three different levels of content curation presently in use and describes accurately the differences between these.

"In regards to levels of curation it is much like Blooms. There is knowledge level curation- it is done for remembering and understanding (the “Learner Level”).

Another level is applying and analyzing- it is curated for use or been used and is a proven tool for using whether it be your tool or a tool you have discovered from your global connections via Social Media, blogs or simple internet searches (the “Facilitator Level”).

Finally, there are curations that go to the level of evaluation and creation… these are the curations that become invaluable tools to others. It takes the most work, but the result is most thorough and the resource it provides to others can be invaluable (the “Designer Level”)."

He concludes by reminding all would-be curators the importance of attribution and the amount of effort that the "designer level" of curation requires: "In this world of immediate access and available content make every effort to honor the source of your curation, inspiration and/or springboard for design.

Those that do curate at a “Designer” level and in many cases are the first in their field of expertise to find a new “method” put hours into the development and design."

Robin Good: Maria Popova has just launched a classy and laudable initiative, focused on increasing awareness and in highlighting the importance of honoring always where or via who you have got to a certain article, report, video or image.

Credit and attribution are not just a "formal" way to comply with rules, laws and authors but an incredibly powerful emebddable mechanism to augment findability, discovery, sinergy and collaboration among human being interested in the same topic.

She writes: "In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency.

A form of authorship, if you will.

Yet we don’t have a standardized system for honoring discovery the way we honor other forms of authorship and other modalities of creative and intellectual investment, from literary citations to Creative Commons image rights."

For this purpose Curator's Code was created.

Curator's Code is first of all "a movement to honor and standardize attribution of discovery across the web" as well as a web site where you can learn about the two key types of attribution that we should be using:

Each one has now a peculiar characterizing icon that Curator's Code suggests to integrate in your news and content publication policies.

Additionally and to make it easy for anyone to integrate these new attribution icons in their work, Curator's Code has created a free bokkmarklet which makes using proper attribution a matter of one clic.

Hat tip to Maria Popova and Curator's Code for launching this initiative.

Whether or not you will sign Curator's Code pledge, become an official web site supporting it, or adopt its bookmarklet instantly is not as important as the key idea behind it: by providing credit and attribution to pieces of content you find elsewhere, you not only honestly reward who has spent time to create that content, but you significantly boost the opportunity for thousands of others to connect, link up to, discover and make greater sense of their search for meaning.

N.B.: Too bad that the Curator's Code bookmarklet doesn't work with Scoop.it, as the one excludes the other. But you could save the two codes for the special attribution characters in a text note and copy and paste whicever you need. Given the need for simplicity and integration this is not an ideal solution but I am sure that between Maria and Guillaume at Scoop.it they will find a way to make this work easily for all. Maria and Guillaume: what do you say?

Thanks Robin for sharing and curating this article with your summary. I discovered it via Barbara Bray's collection where she had re scooped your scoop -- [and if following the curator's code added a via]. I came over here to rescoop (with a via!) because you are the original source and one of the links was broken (you corrected it and added an update) thus reminding me the importance of going to the original source. Here on scoop.it you can just follow the trail of the rescoop icon.

I am disappointed that the bookmarklet doesn't work together with the scoop.it one - but it would be great to have it integrated. Now to figure out how to rescoop it with the characters.

Hi Beth, thanks for your kind feedback. I was just out today for a video interview with Nancy White here in Rome, and she mentioned you as someone she likes for your ability to curate and make sense of things.

Re the integration of the curators' code icons, I have received feedback from Guillaume De Cugies of Scoop.it that he has been exchanging with Maria Popova and that he is looking with her for a way to integrate the two.

For now you can simply install the Curators' Code bookmarklet and use the "via"<a href="http://www.curatorscode.org" target="_blank" style="font-family:sans-serif;text-decoration:none" >&#x1525;</a> or hat tip <a href="http://www.curatorscode.org" target="_blank" style="font-family:sans-serif;text-decoration:none" >&#x21ac;</a> icons by copying and pasting their code into your scoops manually. The problem, at least for me is, that the scoop.it editing window is in the same position where the Curators' Code bookmarklet is and therefore I can't see both at the same time.

In any case I think it would be trivial for Scoop.it or any other tool to integrate such buttons directly into their system without having us to use two different tools for one task.

Many thanks Robin for the help! Somehow I missed the article -- computer fatigue probably :) I read it earlier today and look forward to using the codes. I'm thrilled to hear that scoop.it is looking into integrating them into the platform. Thanks for keeping us updated on this new, and important twist, for curating. Cheers -- Karen

Robin Good: Josh Sternberg at Digiday highlights a trend that is only going to get bigger in the near future: brands, as they realize the increasing need to be active publishers, are recognizing the problems and limitations that this task involves.

"The problem is publishing is a lot harder than it looks, or rather it’s a lot harder to do it with the consistency, day after day, that’s needed to build a long-term audience.

That’s leading some brands to hook onto the idea that their role lies more in the curation of content."

But in choosing this path, the article recommends, brands need to be careful in what and how much they curate.

Here some valuable advice from the article:

"Brands need to be careful in not only what, but how much they curate.

There can’t be articles that make the reader question why a brand is sharing it.

Also, brands need to make sure they’re not just regurgitating content, but instead offering readers/followers valuable information, as readers will quickly determine the curated content — and thus the brand — is not worth their time.

Since consumers have their own tools for curating – Storify, Storyful, etc. – brands have to know each of their customers and have the credibility in their field to get consumers to trust the content they spread."

Hi Robin,
I went to the link you gave me below and somehow it didn't work, can you tell me where to look, I would love to hear about the class you're teaching and see the channels you reviewed, thanks so much:-)

Hi Jan,
I tried the link now and it does work ok for me. In any case here's a screenshot of the tweet: http://i.imgur.com/wlb6n.jpgRe the class and the channels reviewed these are not visible as this was a paid online course and only the participants got all of the recordings. :-(
I can confirm you that I reviewed your work and listed you as a top example of good curation work while detailing your strong traits.

Robin Good: Back in 2010, Mahendra Palsule, wrote an interesting article on the "role of curation in the attention economy".

In it he wrote: "When you share something on any network, you are telling your social circle – “Look at this, this is something I think you will find interesting.”

In essence, you are asking for attention from your followers. Your followers distribute whatever attention currency they have budgeted for you among the things you share.

The attention each item receives depends on the total number of items you share. If you overdo it, you are reducing the value of each shared item...

What the formula doesn’t take into account is that by blindly and indiscriminately increasing one’s ‘give and take’ in social media, one is decreasing the relevance of one’s shares to one’s followers.

By ‘giving back’ to certain people, you’re at the same time ‘taking away’ from your other followers.

When the relevancy of your shares decrease, your reputation and trust declines."

Unless you are a ruthless relevance evaluator of whatever passes in front of your eyes, with an investigator attitude in researching and looking beyond the surface of each news story, the idea of gaining reputation, authority and visibility through curation may be only a trendy illusion.

"Social media tools might indicate you have a large number of followers, your ‘influence’ is ranked highly in terms of numbers, and you become popular as a friendly person. But your followers may not be clicking on the links you tweet or buying the products or services you recommend."

So, rule number one is to have focus and to share only what is truly and verified to be relevant for your audience.

"Curation is such a buzzword these days, that some have gone so far as to dub every act of social media sharing as ‘curation’ – from Foursquare check-ins to Blippy purchases, to Yelp reviews. I consider some of these examples as annotations or adding meta data to a crowdsourced database.

Considering each act of social media sharing as an act of curation is like considering all sex to be an act of love.

The one way I’ve seen true reputation and influence increase on the social web is when one’s shares are relevant to followers.

This necessitates a brutal and ruthless evaluation.

Is this content relevant to my followers? Irrespective of which influencer wrote it, irrespective of which ‘guru’ endorsed it, the relevance question is of prime consideration in deciding whether I endorse, share and propagate it to my followers."

This has me thinking critically about how we are integrating social media. Inviting interaction has been a huge challenge. We are stimulating new conversations in real world time, but that's not reflected in comments and so forth. I like using Scoop.It widgets to get the newest scoop onto the bog in a timely manner and take some time to reflect on post content.

Margot Bloomstein, a content strategist talks about how to combine curation to your content strategy by showcasing lessons she has adopted from museum curators and so much more.

What caught my attention:

**She talks about copywriting issues. Because a curator goes way beyond aggregating which is just gathering content, they arrange it in order of relevance, point out what you should pay attention to and many other important things. It takes a lot of thought to assemble pieces in a cohesive manner, add context to it, ad take it to the next level.

**It is appropiate to give the curator credit if you're going to repost or use it in any manner.

Hey Pedro,
I am the founder of Internet Billboards, my name is Tom George. Do you think you will be curated more on this topic and building a nice Scoop.it page? The reason I ask is I can show you how you can auto share your Scoop.it selections to Internet Billboards.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.